“Holy shit!” she yelps, the tongue flicking from the now-live snake. “I told you not to touch it!”
“It can’t hurt me. I’m holding it around its neck,” I tell her, but I am undeniably moderately displeased with this escalation.
“You’re right, I shouldn’t have touched it. Now where are these toilets?” I ask her.
“That’s the problem with these places. They’re impossible to find, and all you can see are fake toilets.”
She sounds vaguely panicked, her eyes bulging slightly at the snake writhing around my arm now, squeezing it as tight as it can.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “We have much worse on my planet. Snakes are native to your planet as well, if what I’ve read about their geography is correct.”
“Oh, that’s really reassuring,” she says. “Quit playing around. We have to go. I don’t want the lava wave to catch us.”
With that, I manage to extract my arm from the snake’s grip and fling it as far as I can away from us.
Hopefully it will find its way to one of the fake toilets and have a happier ending than a lava wave.
“Swore to myself I’d never come to one of these places again,” Lily says, snarling. “Don’t get me wrong, their bookshelves hold up fantastic, and I really like a lot of their storage cubes. But navigating this place—” she throws up her hands, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her quite so irritated and competent at the same time. “Absolutely not. The minute they announced they could do contactless delivery; I was all in.”
She gives me a long look. “Did they do contactless delivery on your planet?”
“I do not know,” I tell her.
“Right, of course not. They don’t do it as much now, of course, after the Roth invaded. But anyway, I had some IKEA furniture in my apartment back home that’s lasted me since college.”
“College?” I repeat.
“School,” she explains. “School for adults, and don’t worry about it.”
“There is a prize for anyone who bests this place?” I ask, confused. “That is why it is a human coupling ritual?”
“Yes, and the prize is the meat spheres,” she says knowledgeably.
She’s picked up the pace now, practically racing through the strange rooms full of mismatched housewares, dishes, and lamps, and some kind of eating utensils that are shiny and strange and very different than the wooden ones we use on my planet.
There are soft, fuzzy pieces of fabric designed to go on floors, it appears, and I want to take my time sifting through all of these puzzle pieces of humanity to figure out how they fit into my Lily’s world.
“You possessed many bookshelves?” I finally ask.
Lily is panting, running faster than I’ve seen her this whole time, her bare feet slapping along the floor.
I want to offer to carry her, but I know she won’t let me. Not with my wing damaged, which brings me disgrace, but it is what it is.
“Yes, I like to read,” she says. “Books are a little bit harder to find after the Roth invasion, so the ones I have I like to take care of. Or I did, you know, before all this.”
“I will make sure that you have your books.”
She gives me a brief grin, still holding my hand, then tugs me along.
“Faster now,” she says. “We’ve got to get through all these plants, and then we should pop out on the part where all the flat-pack furniture is kept and the checkout lines.”
“The checkout line,” I repeat, intrigued by the idea. “What do you mean a checkout line? What does that have to do with any of these things?”
“Well, you have to buy it. So, you know—you know what, can we just focus? Let’s get through this, and let’s find that flat-pack we’re supposed to assemble. That’s going to be the real challenge here.”
“How hard can assembling furniture be?” I ask, thoroughly confused.
From the look on Lily’s face, I have a feeling the real challenge is not navigating this labyrinth of the human IKEA and digesting meat spheres.
